Warning: This article contains spoilers for NCIS, season 22, episode 14, “Close to Home.”

Which is more suspicious: Victoria Palmer (Elle Graper) hopping into Nick Torres’ (Wilmer Valderrama) car after dark, Victoria Palmer toting around a bag stuffed with cash, or Victoria Palmer lying to her dad (Brian Dietzen‘s Jimmy Palmer) about it?

Answer: It’s all suspicious! And it’s happening on the Palmers’ slice of suburban utopia, so this week’s NCIS entry is, as the episode title states, “Close to Home.” Let’s recap!

Victoria called Uncle Nick when she found a bag containing $35,000 behind a Navy library dumpster. But despite promising she’d tell her father ASAP, it’s clear by the next morning that she did not. (The team bases this assumption on Palmer not blowing up their phones or waiting for them in the big orange room to demand an update on the case.)

Nobody’s eager to break the news to him — particularly not Knight (Katrina Law), who’s hit her yearly quota of awkward conversations with Jimmy and is a little hurt that Victoria didn’t call her about the money.

It is, of course, Kasie (Diona Reasonover) who accidentally spills the beans about “the Victoria thing” after telling Torres that the serial numbers on the cash indicate it’s part of the $5 million stolen from an upstate New York bank 15 years ago when the Saratoga Specter pulled off a flawless heist, then disappeared without a trace. 

But wait! Kasie matches a partial print to Carson Marcone, a local HVAC guy who had an airtight alibi for the original bank heist and was active in the fugitive robbery enthusiast online community. Also, the team finds his beaten, bound body stuffed in his closet, so that sorta rules him out as the Specter.

Palmer aggressively passive-aggressives Torres while they work the scene, but he’s also quick to accept Nick’s apology.

Meanwhile, poor Victoria forgot that she was dealing with a well-oiled crime-solving machine because McGee’s (Sean Murray) review of the security footage shows she was nowhere near the Navy library when she claimed. So Palmer sticks her in the interrogation room “because this is where the liars go,” as he tells Knight.

Jess tries to keep the questioning on track, but between the constant interruption of McGee and Parker (Gary Cole) very sweetly delivering snacks and the Palmers’ daddy-daughter arguing, she barely manages to learn that Victoria was actually hanging out in the woods with her friends instead of prepping for the science fair when she found the money.

Knight scoots out to follow that lead, leaving Jimmy to ask Victoria why she called Nick and not him. “‘Cause he’s a federal agent, and you’re just the ME,” the fruit of his loins says. And if you didn’t audibly gasp at that, I hope you at least winced in sympathy at the blow this child dealt to her father with that “just.” 

But Palmer’s about to get a lot more involved in the agent side of the case when the team learns that Marcone spent a lot of time in the Briarwood neighborhood servicing the HVAC units. Since this is where Jimmy and Victoria live, he’s the best person to lead a low-key investigation.

Under the guise of looking for Victoria’s stolen bike, he and Jess stroll through the neighborhood. Yes, it’s a chance for him to raise his cool quotient with his daughter, but mostly he wants to have the same close relationship with her that they used to have.

Knight’s sympathetic response is interrupted when Rhonda (Kathy Searle), Briarwood’s exuberant security guard, rolls up in her golf cart to congratulate the pair on getting back together. 

She takes them to her security office, proudly showing off the new community fountain on her monitor. (“It’s like I’m guarding Versailles!”) When she goads Jess into telling her when she knew Jimmy was the one, Knight says it’s when he surprised her in the RV — which is when they had their official breakup talk, no? (Yes. Yes, it was.)

Meanwhile, a detective (Vincent M. Ward) who’s been chasing the Saratoga Specter for 15 years shows up at NCIS to hand over the files, including a single hair from the bank vault to be matched against possible suspects. He also geeks out about meeting the living legend Alden Parker.

I’m sorry, did you not know that Parker single-handedly took down the Philly Phantom, a.k.a. the City of Brotherly Love’s third-biggest jewelry thief, and that he did it using a $100 tip the Phantom left at a nearby bar?

“Son,” the detective tells Torres, “we are amongst law enforcement royalty here.” (Let’s ignore the fact that said royalty confessed earlier that he never would’ve returned all that cash if he’d found it as a teenager. We love a reformed hoodlum who’s now a hit on the fugitive robbery enthusiast convention circuit!)

After some lobbying from Knight, Parker agrees to let Jimmy run an undercover op to investigate the six people whose HVAC systems Marcone had serviced over the past few months, according to the Briarwood security logs, under the assumption that Marcone believed one of them to be the Specter.

To gather DNA for comparison to the lone hair, Palmer will throw a neighborhood party featuring his spicy sangria, where he’ll collect the discarded cups from the six suspects. So the doctor with the good calves, as he’s known around Briarwood, dons a pair of specs with a built-in camera and goes around pouring drinks and charming his neighbors as he gathers evidence to convict one of them of murder.

Sidenote: Those Clark Kent glasses are — they’re very, very good. I know the little round specs are Jimmy’s trademark, but the dark frames get two enthusiastic yet respectful thumbs up from me.

Knight, meanwhile, gives two enthusiastic and disrespectful thumbs down to Wendy Hill (Erinn Hayes), who’s new to Briarwood and is clearly interested in Palmer and his fine calves. Jimmy’s so focused on bagging and tagging the cups that he misses Wendy’s not-at-all subtle come-on, but Jess catches every moment of it.

Back at NCIS HQ, she and Victoria cyberstalk — er, conduct research — on this new woman, then talk about the challenges of living with the high expectations of a loving, involved dad. Knight gently tells her to talk to Palmer about how she’s feeling.

Returning to the case, the only partial DNA match to the hair Kasie found was on one of the unlabeled cups in the trash. But when Knight discovers that Wendy’s Briarwood townhouse was purchased with $200,000 in cash 15 years ago, yet she only moved in a few months ago, the team’s suspicions mount.

They try to reach Palmer, but he’s living in the moment with Wendy in the Briarwood rec room, which means he’s disengaged from his phone. Jess straight-up texts him, “Jimmy, you’re in danger. Wendy is the Specter!!!” which seems like it’s going to put him in even more danger since presumably Knight knows that his texts appear on his screen for anyone to read, including the woman they believed already did one murder.

When Wendy seductively locks the door to give the two of them privacy, what choice do Knight and company have other than to literally crash their way in to rescue Jimmy from, well, from making out with Wendy on the community couch?

Do I buy that cautious, thoughtful Jimmy would throw down with a new neighbor in the middle of an undercover-ish op? I do not. But maybe he had too many cups of spicy sangria.

When Palmer laments that Wendy was playing him, Torres says it’s part of that undercover lifestyle. But Wendy’s not the Saratoga Specter after all; her dad was. He confessed his crime on his deathbed two months ago and told Wendy that he bought her a townhouse with his stolen money. She also mentions that Marcone was always nice during his many visits to fix her wonky furnace.

So she was into Palmer. Must be the calves! 

Since Wendy wasn’t on the list of Marcone’s recent customers, the team returns to the security logs and discovers that his visits were erased from the records. Furthermore, Rhonda, the security guard, has a background in tech and would be able to spy on the residents through their neighborhood app.

Time for a trap! Palmer and Victoria have a phone call in which she admits that she lied about finding the money in the forest because she was actually at the vacant construction site that’s a makeout spot for high schoolers.

As they suspected, Rhonda listens in and sneaks onto the site to claim the rest of the money, but the crew is there to arrest her.

They also recover the remaining $2.6 million in Wendy’s AC vents where her dad stashed it (and where Marcone had been sneaking chunks out one duffel bag at a time during his bogus repair visits).  

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Although Wendy seems way less into Palmer after being led away in cuffs by his ex-girlfriend, Victoria is ecstatic at her role in the sting operation and races to hug Jimmy. When he suggests they see if the agents aren’t too busy to join them for ice cream, she prefers to keep the guest list to two. “Thankfully, you’re just the ME.”

And that’s what we call a happy ending sundae with a cherry on top.

Stray shots

• Wait, so does Wendy get to keep her house since it was purchased with stolen money? I feel like that’s a big ol’ no. Also, is Jess’ palpable jealousy and the callback to their “I love you, but we need to break up” convo a sign of hope for her and Jimmy or yet another nail in that coffin?
• As always, shoutout to Barbara in accounting. I long for the day she’s front and center on another case.
• Circling back to Jimmy and Jess’ cuisine conversation, is halibut always dry, and more troublingly, how do you also make a sauce dry too?
• The offscreen death of Breena remains a gasp-out-loud moment in my NCIS viewing history, and it’s opened the door for some top-notch character beats for Palmer as he navigates single dad-hood. “Close to Home” is another stellar entry in that ongoing storyline.